In 1979, Basu Chatterjee made Baaton Baaton Mein and unobtrusively brought to us the dating and courtship rituals of a community that was till then either caricatured or just overlooked in Hindi cinema. Nancy Perreira and Tony Braganza…
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Matriarchal manipulation in a patriarchal world is depicted unsparingly in Usha Priyamwada’s Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein (Now playing on Prasar Bharti). The mother resentful of her lecturer daughter’s comfortable life in her college residence because the younger daughters…
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“Start with hope..always start with hope. We went from being a shitty team to become one of the biggest dynasties in the sport and all it needed was one match to light this fire,” says Michael Jordan at…
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In 1947, my grandparents brought three children and the remains of an uprooted life from Pakistan to India in a train. One of those children was my mother. I grew up hearing a lot of stories about the…
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Three documentaries streaming right now show the ultimate culmination of the Bois Locker Room culture. And what happens when one gender is taught to mistrust its instincts of self-preservation and the other does not even learn something as…
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In Sudip Sharma’s Paatal Lok (Now streaming on Amazon. Co written by Sharma, Sagar Haveli, Hardik Mehta and Gunjit Chopra. Directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy), India’s disowned inhabit the headlines we turn away from. A young…
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There is an unavenged little boy in Karan Johar. A son who saw his naively golden-hearted father not getting his due in an industry driven by merciless opportunism so it is apt that Johar should pick a Father India metaphor to replay and remake in the memory of Yash Johar. Karan Malhotra’s Agneepath tries to avenge […]
I was randomly cruising through the web portal of Vogue India when I stumbled into a post written by a blogger (a renowned fashionista) who had inferred that when she mixed and matched the various pieces of couture, haute or not, with a pair of sandals bought from local brands, they could put Jimmy […]
When I was a kid, we had a Videocon VHS at home. Grandpa would bring videocassettes from the nearby library, and played them on it. I asked him innocent questions like, “Tatha, don’t you get bored? These films go so slow…and some of them are not even in colour!” He would smile at me and […]
We Hollywood groupies are a spoiled lot. Just because Ricky Gervais made the Golden Globes lip-smackingly outrageous last year, we expected him to stay true to his irreverent form this year. What we got instead were insults that were cringe-making, with no trace of 2011’s ‘there’s a grain of truth here so suck it up, […]
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes(1970) is one of Billy Wilder‘s least known works. It is one of the ‘revealed’ Holmes stories, and is not part of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon. The film takes a satirical look at the Holmes-Watson equation, and, as the name suggests, touches upon the private life of the genius […]
Harishchandrachi Factory, if you haven’t seen it till date is strongly reminiscent of Malgudi Days, DD serials of yore, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee oeuvre of films, the feeling of snugging into the quilt to hear Grandma tell a story. In short, the Good Old Days. Days when films were not merely about form or technique, but […]
The good thing about cheaper DVDs flooding the market is that one no longer has to think twice before picking up a film. My recent acquisitions include Raj Kapoor’s Prem Rog, Raj Sippy’s kidnapping caper Inkaar, Gulzar’s Khushboo and a few others just for a song. None of the above films are masterpieces from any […]
So the Talwars are back in the dock for their daughter’s murder. Last year, I read in a magazine what they had to go through during the erratic investigation of their daughter’s murder. The account of their misery was written by someone who knew the couple and can vouch for the fact that the good doctor has “gentle hands. What […]
Watching Lasse Hallstrom’s Chocolat always revives me. And turns life into a piece of deeply dark, melt-on-the-soul chocolate. And its not just the luscious imagery of chocolate being pounded, melted, tempered, crafted and moulded into temptation that sates the senses. It just feels so right, this film because like a cup of chilli spiked hot chocolate, it […]
Some believe 80’s to be the worst period in the history of Indian cinema. I beg to differ – but only a wee bit. My early film viewing experience is mostly spread across late 80s- early 90s so I could safely say I’ve had the best (or worst) of both the decades. The 80s had indeed reached the […]
Are you looking for a DVD of the Apu Trilogy? Log on to a site called “Movie Mail” (http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk/film/12274/The-Apu-Trilogy-(Box-Set)/) and buy it online for 26.99 GBP…Or do you prefer Ritwik Ghatak? Get DVDs for The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara) or A River Called Titas (Titas Ekti Nodir Nam) from the BFI website (http://filmstore.bfi.org.uk) at 10.99 GBP each. All loaded with […]
2011 made us bid goodbye unwillingly and sorrowfully to… (Tribute: http://unboxedwriters.com/2011/12/satyadev-dubey-the-resilient-cactus/) Satyadev Dubey who wrote film dialogues like he was unaware of all the cliches and conventions that do not let cinematic characters breathe. And produced and directed theatre with a fierce passion that sought and demanded nothing but absolute attention and commitment from those […]